A little birdie sent me a copy of Google - Behind the Screen, an Australian a Dutch documentary about everyone's favorite search engine that aired this month Down Under.

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My favorite parts are when the documentary makers dig in their heels about the privacy implications of Google storing its users' search history for an indefinite amount of time. The clip I included above, a bit of the interview with Google VP Marissa Mayer, is a taste of how that goes.

Otherwise, the 50 minute film is an interesting - but not revelatory - look into the culture and technology behind Google, and included more interview clips with (the 14-hour Pine email session) Mayer, Vint Cerf and Google Earth and Google Books product managers. The interviews occasionally get uncomfortable when Googlers face the tougher questions (ie, "Why is your book scanning technology proprietary and only accessible to Google partners? What are the political and security implications of detailed photographs of all the Earth's surface? Why should users trust Google?"). It seems that they've all memorized Google's mission (say it with me now: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") but get pretty tongue-tied and stutter things about "disruptive technology" and "software engineers just making the world a better place" otherwise.

There are lots of shots of colorful office spaces and pudgy white male Stanford grads on laptops (but sometimes playing volleyball) on Google's sprawling, sunlit Mountainview campus. If you're into dot com lore, most of GOOG's well-known bits of office culture are discussed, too - from developers' 20% time to the origins of their "Don't be evil" motto. (It was a message to the business people left on a whiteboard by an engineer.)

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If I knew how you non-Aussies could catch the film yourself (you know, beyond outright suggesting you pirate it using BitTorrent, which I would never do), I'd tell ya. Alas.